


Pretty Like A Girl

by cobblestoner



Category: The Libertines
Genre: Anal Fingering, Freudian Elements, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Oral Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Resolved Sexual Tension, brief mention of Carl/Edie - Freeform, childhood themes, graphic sex because i like to be anatomically correct, implied open relationship, this is literally just sex and total conjecture about carl's issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 18:56:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5597050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cobblestoner/pseuds/cobblestoner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in current day. Carl has a breakthrough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretty Like A Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Has only been Britpicked by an American friend who's lived in London for a few months, so please let me know if anything in the dialogue makes you cringe. This is the first Libs fic I've written and I welcome criticism in general.

Carl knows that the loss of his twin brother relates to the intensity of his feelings for Pete. It has something to do with everything - although not as much as people sometimes think. He lives for the now and a lot of “now”s have happened in 37 years, and surely the significance of that outweighs the pain of the moment when he first became alone. 

When survival became important to him, he discovered the efficacy of simply ignoring what made him want to die. Ignoring led to forgetting.

In Somerset, on Carl’s birthday, the reunited Libertines visit a rocky beach. Gary steps down though the pools to the water, and Pete and Carl follow him with their lit cigarettes. Carl mentions to Pete that he hasn’t been to this particular spot since he was living at the commune nearby. Pete gets a kick out of that, and wants Carl to tell him what he remembers, if he can say anything about the last day he was here. Carl casts about looking for something to jog his memory. There is a familiar, pungent ocean scent on the wind. His eyes follow the cloudy sky and grey sea over to the cliffs, to the shoreline, and a small cove to their left. It’s then that Carl sees the boy.

Not a real boy; a boy in his memory. Not a real boy in his memory either. But the image is clear, almost more real than the scenery before him. The past shoving its way into the present. 

The boy crouches where the rocks meet the lapping waves. He wears swim trunks and his back is sun tanned, and his dark hair is cropped short. He’s focused on something in the water, something in his hands, a shell or a fossil. He turns and looks at Carl and grins like he's got an exciting discovery to show him. 

He looks just like Carl, but happier, more beautiful. His wet hair is in his eyes. Carl loves him. Carl wants to look at him forever. 

“Where’d you go, Carlos?” 

Carl hears his best friend’s words and realizes that he has been staring at nothing for quite a few moments while holding his cigarette in midair, halfway to his lips. He doesn’t look at Pete because he knows Pete will see more than he wants him to see. 

“I was here with my mum and her friends,” he says. “It was a good time.” He takes the drag that he was supposed to take and comes back to reality, and now he can meet those questioning eyes, but as soon as he turns and looks at Pete… he stops dead once more. 

Because again, he sees a little boy. 

Pete, of course, looks like a child crossed with an old man. Like a kid wearing a salt-and-pepper wig and an oversized coat. His round eyes are watching Carl carefully. And Carl realizes (with a certain amount of nausea) that he’s solved part of the mystery of why he fell head over heels for a dark-haired baby-faced boy named Peter Doherty.

* 

A few months and therapy sessions later, Carl is still mulling it over in the back of his mind. The miracle of their album release has actually occurred and the shows continue with as few hiccups as can be expected. 

The energy between them was different tonight. Carl stood close to Pete and sang lines with him on You’re My Waterloo, letting Pete’s eyes meet his. Letting Pete sing him his love song. Because as much as it makes him uncomfortable - all the eyes on them while Pete’s singing that particular song - he’s also tired of the look on Pete’s face when he’s singing it alone across the stage. How he’ll glance back at Carl who’s blatantly ignoring everything but his guitar, and… and Carl just can’t do it anymore. Not tonight. He stands with Pete the whole bloody time while the crowd screams and screams. 

There really only were a couple times that his relationship with Pete entered “physicality” and they were both wasted enough that it hadn’t really mattered, had it. Never with the lights on, always… well, always in the dark. It’s happened enough that they get to be coy about it, have a bit of fun with it, and Carl can’t deny it when Pete calls him a former lover. But it was so brief that when they turn around and say they’ve never had sex, that doesn’t feel like a lie either.

Gazing into Pete’s eyes, seeing his breathless infatuation laid bare by this song which has always exposed them, Carl remembers. There are moments that the substances didn’t steal from his memory. The hot rush of seeing Pete lick his hand before reaching for Carl’s cock, although he doesn’t remember the moment it made contact. Pete’s teeth on his neck. 

The cold sink against Carl’s face as Pete rubs off between his arsecheeks, the pleasure that isn’t supposed to happen each time the head of Pete’s cock catches on his hole.

The guilt and disgust the next day, looking at his own pretty, pretty face in that mirror. The self-loathing he’d always felt, finding its burning nucleus.

The blooming pain as he smashes his face into Alan McGee’s sink.

At the hotel after the gig there’s a party in Pete’s room, but neither of them are quite up for it. They don’t have the attention span for other people after a show that felt so intimate. They make the necessary banter with the necessary people and sneak off to Carl’s room. The balcony is several stories up and too high for the paparazzi to notice them as they share a single cigarette. They ignore the pair of patio lounge chairs and hang over the concrete barrier, taking in the bright foreign city below. Pete is humming the Supremes song which he tried to rip off for Milkman’s Horse and Carl scoffs at him. 

“Still can’t get that ‘baby, baby’ thing out of your head?”

In response, Pete just starts snapping his fingers and dancing, camp as can be. “I’ve got this burning yearning yearning feeling inside me…. Oh, deep, deep inside me… And it hurts so bad, baby….” 

Carl flicks away the cigarette and takes Pete’s hand, putting on his best mock-somber face as they dance and Pete twirls him through the open door back into the hotel room. Pete’s singing loudly now and Carl joins him. “You came into my heart… So tenderly, with a burning love… that stings like a….”

“... kick in the teeth… ” sings Pete, and then he stops, staring at something behind Carl. Carl turns around to see a full-length mirror. Pete looks away quickly but Carl has caught him, and squeezes his hand, questioning. “It’s just funny,” says Pete with a sad smile, “all the ways I’ve ruined myself. We look like an anti-drug advert. This is normal you: and there's a video of handsome Carlos surrounded by screaming fangirls. Then, this is you after a decade of heroin: and it’s me looking like I’m 53, going, what’ve I done?” 

It’s an absurd statement considering Pete’s massive fawning fanbase. But Carl knows Pete is eternally bewildered by the absence of a slim doe-eyed youth when he looks in the mirror. And Pete seems to think he’s past the point of scoring an inkling of desire from his “straight” best friend. Even by the touchy-feely standards of their friendship, he's done everything he can not to give Carl the wrong impression. He stops short of the line every time - this Peter wouldn’t try to kiss Carl on the lips at the NME awards or stand pressed up behind him to share a mic.

Sometimes Pete’s downright meek. As if he thinks Carl is repulsed by him. And that upsets Carl deeply. First of all, because he’s not repulsed by Pete; because his stomach still flips when they lock eyes, because he still occasionally gets an awkward onstage semi, because he’s been a randy mess ever since the band got back together and Edie and the rest have noticed it.

But Pete never actually knew much about that, did he. How far it went. 

Secondly, because Pete isn’t ruined. He still makes music that rips out hearts. And now, Pete shines even brighter, because he’s the man who gave up the world’s greatest pleasures to do the right thing. _Because he gave up all that pleasure to be with you_ , says a little voice in Carl’s head, which isn’t exactly correct but he can’t shut it up.

He can’t have Pete believing that he’s ruined, because Pete traded escapist bliss for this life. The opportunity to not feel ruined. And Carl wants to make it as good for him as he possibly can, because Carl is terrified of losing him again. So Carl wraps his arms around Pete’s neck and presses their foreheads together. And he tries to tell Pete how unruined he is. “You’re gorgeous,” he says. “Distractingly so. I love you more than I ever have.”

Pete goes totally still, and Carl realizes what that sounded like. 10 years of therapy ago he would have panicked and come up with a way to diffuse things which probably would have wrecked both of them. Now, he knows it’s simply the truth. 

Fuck it. He kisses Pete on the corner of his mouth. Then he takes Pete’s lower lip in his teeth and then their lips are fitting together, sliding together. Of course it’s precious and wet and like poetry between them.

“Darling… what’s happening, what’s…” Pete murmurs against his mouth, rosy tender in a way that makes Carl’s chest ache.

“You deserve this,” Carl says with a smile. He seeks Pete’s tongue with his but Pete has leaned away and is putting an arm between their chests, and Carl opens his eyes to see that he’s frowning. 

“Is this a fucking pity kiss? Because fuck you if so.”

Carl grabs him around his soft, wide waist and pushes his prick against Pete’s thigh. “Does that feel like pity, Bilo?” 

And because he’s staring into Pete’s eyes, not only to show Pete how much he wants him but also to get the eternal satisfaction of seeing Pete proved wrong about something, Carl sees his best friend’s eyes grow dark. He grabs Carl’s chin and takes him, takes his mouth. The kiss is monumental, and they’re soaring, breathless, pressed up against each other by Carl grasping at Pete’s back and shoulders and Pete unceremoniously grabbing Carl’s ass. Pete laps at his tongue like a kitten and it’s so strangely hot that Carl finds himself falling limp and open as they pull each other onto the bed.

Carl remembers the fear then, as Pete crawls on top of him, but he doesn’t feel it. The fear of becoming what his childhood bullies always said he was. It’s funny to him now, it’s really quite funny - that he ever cared when someone called him a faggot or told him he had cocksucker lips. Because it’s so inconsequential, it’s so totally nil compared to the glory that burns between him and Pete, and what they’ve accomplished together, and the vertigo of having his fucking soulmate in his arms, feeling his shaking fingers pushing into his hair.

“You like that, right, you like your hair pulled…?” Pete gasps, between kisses. 

“Yeah,” replies Carl, knowing he’s told Pete this, told Pete that’s part of why he keeps it long. 

“Christ…” says Pete, tangling both hands into Carl’s hair and tugging gently. He leans away and looks at his own fingers. He seems incredulous, like he’s witnessing a miracle, and Carl knows exactly why - because even beyond what Carl suspects about Pete’s self-esteem, they’d both resigned themselves to the new order between them. They’re two adults now, two fathers, doing the Libertines the professional way. Of course their friendship would always be romantic but things were different without the schoolboy hormones, and keeping it as straight as possible was best for everyone anyway. 

Yet here they are, both sober and going at it on a hotel bed for the first time ever. It’s not just the old thing. It’s worse.

Hell, occasionally Pete had even convinced Carl that he didn’t want Carl’s body anymore, that he’d “rather toss off a frog”. But the look on his face … it’s laughable that Carl believed that for even a moment. The fingers tugging so deliciously on Carl’s hair, sending shocks up and down his spine, drawing muted gasps out of his throat, scratching over his neck, one hand wandering to his face to trace his features, ghost over his eyelashes… these are realizations of Pete’s fantasies. His reverent silence says everything. His thumb brushes Carl’s mouth and then his breath hitches as he stares, jaw dropped, circling over and over Carl’s still spit-lubed lips. He slips his fingers into Carl’s mouth, which gets Carl profoundly hard as he struggles to maintain his trademark languid bedroom eyes, and then Pete returns the wet digits to their task of tracing and massaging Carl’s lips while he grabs fistfuls of Carl’s hair with his other hand.

As Pete continues to repeat the motions - treating Carl’s lips like a cunt or something, rubbing him until the friction dries up, and then fucking Carl’s mouth to coat his fingers in more saliva - something shifts in Carl and his cock starts _throbbing_. Their eyes are locked together, and as Carl begins to come apart he feels tears well up. His lips feel so sensitive, they must be cherry red… They’re still both fully clothed but he’s moaning and writhing and losing control and feeling Pete’s fingers, Pete’s clever fingers, _Pete’s fingers strumming Carl’s lips and making Carl sing for him_ … 

Carl bucks against Pete’s thigh and almost cums. Almost. He whines and pushes away from Pete, startled by his own body.

“What’s wrong?” says Pete, pausing. 

“Nearly got off,” says Carl, exhilarated and terrified. 

Pete stares at him, then breaks into an enormous grin. “Fucking hell, Carlos! Fuck yeah!” He reaches for Carl’s fly as he says, low, “I can make you cum loads of times, you know.”

The bastard. They shuck off his trousers and Pete sighs Carl’s name when he sees his cock, so wet with precum it sticks to his briefs. Carl’s exhibitionist heart shudders happily at that intense gaze, the way Pete palms his cock so tenderly, as if it’s the most precious thing in the world. He delicately pulls up the foreskin and bends down to suck up the mess that gathers at the tip and Carl groans at how filthy it is and how good it feels. 

“Fucking take these off, darling,” Carl says, and tugs at Pete’s belt. If he lets him Pete will probably just go to work again without a care in the world for his own body, all wrapped up in being allowed to touch Carl. Pete attends to his own fly and falls over on the other side of the bed in the process. 

“We’re getting naked now?” he grins while wrestling with his trousers. “But I rather like you like this. With your prick poking out under that becoming grey shirt.” And your lips red and your hair a mess, Carl hears as well. 

“Fine then,” says Carl, crawling towards Pete, not really caring whether he’s joking, wanting to taste Pete’s cock sooner rather than later anyway. They end up lying on their sides in opposite directions. Pete gasps as he realizes what’s about to happen and cries out when Carl’s mouth envelops his cock.

Carl chokes, because he still hasn’t done much of this. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t even matter, because Carl loves the dark hot acrid smell, he loves having his face buried in the place he’s not supposed to think about. 

Pete’s thighs are trembling and he’s yelling Carl’s name, he’s yelling all of Carl’s names, and then… fuck … Carl is on the edge again because Pete’s talented mouth is taking his cock. Christ, between the vibrations of Pete’s continued helpless moans and his obviously extensive experience, it’s one of the best blowjobs Carl’s ever had.

When Carl slides a wet finger around to his hole, Pete seems to completely lose it and suddenly he’s on top, feeding his cock into Carl’s mouth, pulling Carl’s leg’s apart, licking all over his balls and down his taint as far as he can reach and then sucking Carl’s aching cock back into his throat right down to the base. He no gag reflex whatsoever. He swallows and Carl cums, with a long groan, shooting straight up Pete’s throat. 

Pete’s cock has slipped out of his mouth but Carl’s ended up with two fingers up Pete’s arse and he can’t help but curl them as he cums, his toes digging into the pillows and his hands digging into Pete’s flesh. Pete cries out too and grinds back into the abuse. He fists his cock and sits back next to Carl’s head, jerking off in Carl’s face. 

Carl’s still twitching, eddies of pleasure running through him, as he meets Pete’s brown eyes and shows Pete how good he feels, how spent and debauched he is, and Pete’s brow knits in more than pleasure. Carl rubs that spot inside Pete and opens his mouth, offering his tongue, offering his throat if Pete wants to use it, but Pete just groans and stares and brings his cock ever so slightly closer to Carl’s lips. Then Pete’s making wild, broken noises and his cum is on Carl’s face and in his mouth. 

Their eyes are locked together, their free hands have somehow sought each other and are clasped together on the bed without either realizing it. They stay like that for a moment, chests heaving, rubbing their softening cocks. Carl’s fingers slip out of Pete, who keens. 

“Holy fuck, Carlos.” He collapses next to Carl so they’re both lying the wrong way on the bed. Carl realizes they’re still wearing their socks too.

“We can wait a bit for the other ones, can’t we?” says Carl.

“The… what?”

“The orgasms.”

Pete huffs in agreement. Carl gets up and walks around the bed, looking for his cigarettes. He finds them and notices Pete staring dumbfounded at his ass. Carl can’t hold back a smug smile as he lights a fag.

Pete cocks his head. “This is all so sudden, love, you have to tell me what’s going on.”

“Come out for a smoke laddie and perhaps I may tell you my tale,” says Carl in some strange mix of accents. Pete grins and they head back out on the balcony, still half-naked - the railing is a solid concrete wall that comes up above their waists, so there’s no risk of them being seen. Carl gets a thrill from it anyway. 

They lie on a lounge chair. Pete has brought the comforter off the bed and pulls it over them, pulls Carl into his arms and nuzzles his hair. Carl lets him have a drag off his cigarette. He can’t help but think of Deft Left Hand, of lying by Pete’s side with a view of Arcady. Tonight, Arcady is the light polluted sky over a foreign city, and a handful of barely visible stars, and the din of traffic below. 

He can’t take his eyes from Pete’s, even though he’s mildly worried about getting ash on the blanket. Isn’t that the way it always is? How can he even describe it? But now that things dormant and hidden have been pushed out into the volatile space between them, it’s all lit up in new colors - Pete’s lips pursed coyly, then smiling in that way he only does for Carl; Carl's eyes flicking over Pete's face as he counts his many blemishes and scars. Some are new, and some are more familiar to Carl than his own toes.

“So, mock turtle, you were telling me your history,” says Pete.

“Well…” Carl doesn’t know where to begin. “There’s all this reflection and all that. But… on my birthday, Pete, at the beach…”

“There was something there,” says Pete. “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

Ah. Of course Pete had noticed him acting strangely, and remembered. “Dunno if I told you this when we were lads. You once had imaginary friends, right?”

“Loads of ‘em,” says Pete, and of course Carl knew this. 

“I had one. Lasted for a long time, too. I think I was 13 or so when I stopped pretending. Pretending my brother was there.” 

Pete sits in silence for a moment. Then he pulls Carl’s head against his. “You did tell me about that,” says Pete, “but it was forever ago.”

“I forgot about it, actually. I mean… I pushed it aside." Carl flicks away his cigarette. "Then I saw him by the water, I had a memory of seeing him there, and it all came rushing back. That was my entire childhood! I spent it with this boy in my head, and I loved him so much. I went through puberty, y’know… uh… and all of those feelings were tied up with him. Sexual feelings.”

“S’what you call a primal fantasy.”

“What?”

“Like, Freudian, although Freud’s rubbish.”

“Pretty much. So at some point I learned to be ashamed of that and then I stopped imagining him.” Carl pauses. “And -” He trails off.

“And it was like losing him all over again.” 

“It was like killing him. Like… like I corrupted him and then I destroyed him.”

Pete takes that in. Pete can be a good listener sometimes. “I always wondered if that was part of your no homo thing. Because if I’m your brother, that makes this incest, right?” He throws his knee around Carl’s waist and Carl snorts, torn between horror and amusement.

Pete quiets, tracing slow shapes through Carl’s hair. “You know that this is a dream within a dream, right?” he murmurs. “I can scarcely believe you’re here with me in the first place.”

“I can scarcely believe that you’re breathing.”

Pete sighs. “That makes two of us.”

“And that’s, that’s really why. Tonight. I’ve already lost you, and it had nothing at all to do with any of this, and now… I do know that forever’s not much time, love.”

Pete smiles. A siren sounds in the distance, and they kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> I fell in love with the Libertines and wrote the first draft of this in early September, and this interview came out a week later and made my day: "We played (You're My Waterloo) at a concert recently. Just after I sing, "You're the only lover I've had", sometime people like to look for clues about our relationship, but every time I meet his gaze when I'm singing those lines, he makes this face [looks up to the sky and shakes his head, grimacing]." Oh, we know, Pete. ;)
> 
> Sorry there wasn't another orgasm, I wasn't really planning on one but it occurs to me that someone might have expected more sex based on that line. Oops. It just really turned me on.
> 
> Thanks for reading, I'd love to hear feedback!


End file.
